We finally sent out our wedding invitations a few weeks ago… and phew… what a weight off our shoulders! Even though we sent some Save-the-Date cards that I covered in a previous post, the wedding somehow feels more real with the formal invitations sent out.

I am really proud of the work that we put into these invitations. Can you believe that more than 100 hours of our own time and hard work went into these? Although they were printed elsewhere, I am really happy to say we did these 100% by ourselves: designing it, handwriting it all, illustrating it all, mailing it, and putting it all together.

I designed our wedding logo and ordered an embosser and plates to do our gold seals for the envelopes. We’ll also be using the embosser for other parts of the wedding such as programs and napkins. Good job to Allan for getting these perfectly centered while doing the pressing

As before, we continued to use our custom return address stamp from Paperfinger on Etsy…

And I spent hours upon hours doing all the hand calligraphy with a dip calligraphy pen, and also did all the heat embossing myself for the gold tree on the envelope as we did with our save-the-dates before.

We really wanted to do a unique invitation, so we continued with the theme of the wooden wedding invites and thanks to my awesome bridesmaid Charmainne who gave us the idea of doing a #10 size card. It was hard to find envelopes that size that matched our save-the-date envelopes… but I managed to find some at Paper Source.

It turned out really cool and I love the length of it. I designed the text and the logo and we sent it all off to Night Owl Paper Goods to be printed on wooden birch cards… Kudos again to Night Owl… they turned out beautiful!

I also designed our insert cards in Illustrator — 2 double-sided cards with lots of information about the wedding and the area.

One of my favourite hidden parts is the pattern at the top and bottom of the cards… they are actually surfing waves if you look really closely. Thanks to VanPrint for doing an awesome job on the printing.

(click for larger)

Probably my favourite part of the wedding work we’ve done so far is actually the custom wedding map that Allan and I made together. Both of us laboured over Adobe Illustrator for probably 60 hours alone just on this map. Allan did all of the illustrations himself… what you see here on the image is actually all done by vector work from scratch. I also did the text work, the actual road map, and the colouring. I had a pretty clear vision of how I wanted this map to look, so it definitely took some time and some heated discussions and tons of compromise between us to get it to look just right and represent both of us. It sounds funny, but it was a good test of our relationship.

Check out some of the little personal details… that’s an actual representation of Allan’s little green VW golf with surfboards on top.

And of course our interpretation of the Black Rock and the Ucluelet Community Centre … and us on the little patio getting married Hee hee!

I can’t believe the wedding is only 2.5 months away… scary and exciting! Yay!

I can’t believe how quickly time is flying by… it’s hard to believe it is only 6 months or so until our wedding! Although we have booked most of the big parts (venue, photographer, DJ, dress etc), there’s still a million little things we need to get done!

I thought it would be neat to show off the little save-the-date cards we sent out just last week to all our guests. It’s part D-I-Y and part bought, but we really loved how they turned out!

I purchased a calligraphy pen to do dip pen calligraphy. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be… and very messy! We also only bought the exact number of envelopes needed (not a good idea!) so there was no room for error with the handwritten addresses.

I am actually really happy with how the calligraphy went. Although it wasn’t traditional formal calligraphy, I got the hang of dipping the pen in the ink, holding the pen properly, and learning how to regulate ink flow. In hindsight, it would have been easier to use a normal calligraphy pen, but I do like the effect the dip pen has.

I love LOVE LOVE the save-the-date cards we ordered from Night Owl Paper Goods. These beautiful wooden invitations are very “west coast”, but still elegant enough for a wedding. We designed the artwork, layout, and text ourself using Adobe Illustrator, and then had Night Owl print them on their high-quality very thin birch cards. Each one is unique with the wood grain and they are very sturdy while still being light. They also came with envelopes and are very good value. We LOVED them! You can see both their custom wooden wedding invitations and their ready-to-go wooden wedding suites here. Highly recommended!

I also did all the embossing and envelope decoration myself. Do-it-yourself embossing is time consuming but the final result is really cool! We cut a custom tree stamp into the correct size and shape.

Then you sprinkle embossing powder onto the clear stamped area, and then gently shake it off so that only the shape you want remains.

You then use a special heating tool to melt the powders which then gives a raised metallic sheen. Pretty!

On the back of the cards, we used a gorgeous custom made return address stamp that we purchased from Etsy from Paperfinger. Bryn creates your return address stamp using hand-drawn calligraphy. Each letter and stamp is unique (it’s not a font!)! We really loved it!

Last but not least, we attached a gold sticker seal to the back of each envelope and categorized them by country to get ready for mailing!

Wohooo! One hundred custom Save-the-Dates done! And it only took 20 straight hours of work

What do you think?